Abstract

An egg drop contest recently held at the University of Witwatersrand served to test
engineering students' ability to solve non-standard problems. In this contest, students
designed and built structures to protect their cargo - a raw egg. The structures were
dropped 15 m onto a hard surface. The goal was to prevent damage to the egg upon
impact. This paper explores some of the experimental and theoretical techniques
that could be used to analyse and design a suitable impact resistant structure. The
accelerations of the egg during free-fall and impact were measured by a miniature custom
built accelerometer sensor and recorded by a data acquisition system. Measurements
show that an egg housed in a test structure and dropped from only 3 m can produce
accelerations greater than 70 g. The results from a theoretical model of impact presented
in this paper closely matches the measured accelerations. The model predicts that if the
test structure investigated would be dropped from 15 m, the egg would be subject to
accelerations of approximately 100 g.